Highly ordered mesoporous NiO anode material for lithium ion batteries with an excellent electrochemical performance

In this work, we have synthesized highly ordered mesoporous NiO materials by a nanocasting method using mesoporous silica KIT-6 as the hard templates. Mesoporous NiO particles were characterized by small angle X-ray diffraction (XRD), nitrogen adsorption/desorption, and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The results demonstrated that the as-prepared mesoporous NiO had an ordered Ia3d symmetric mesostructure, with a high surface area of 96 m2/g. Mesoporous NiO materials were tested as an anode material for lithium ion batteries, exhibiting much lower activation energy (20.75 kJ mol−1) compared to the bulk NiO (45.02 kJ mol−1). We found that the mesoporous NiO electrode has higher lithium intercalation kinetics than its bulk counterpart. The specific capacity of mesoporous NiO after 50 cycles was maintained 680 mAh/g at 0.1 C, which was much higher than that of the commercial bulk NiO (188 mAh/g). Furthermore, at a high rate of 2C, the discharge capacity of mesoporous NiO was as high as 515 mAh/g, demonstrating the potential to be used for high power lithium ion batteries.